Michaels, Traded, Says, Th-Th-That's All, ESPN

When you have been swapped from ESPN to NBC for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, as Al Michaels has, it pays to maintain your sense of humor. A guy like Michaels has stature in sportscasting, and being exchanged for the cartoon star of "Empty Socks" and "Hungry Hoboes" might be humbling.

"This is great," Michaels said in an interview yesterday from Los Angeles. "It's hysterical. I love the little ironies of life."

The toon-for-human transaction was the topper to a multipart deal that wrapped the odyssey of Michaels, who had signed with ESPN last July to continue calling "Monday Night Football," as he had at ABC Sports.

But he eventually wanted out to rejoin John Madden, his ABC partner for the past four years, on NBC's new Sunday night N.F.L. broadcasts.

The trade, which was engineered Tuesday but announced yesterday, appears to be as lopsided as the Lou Brock-for-Ernie Broglio deal in the 1960's. Michaels is 61, active, productive, camera-ready, capable of flawless game calls.

Oswald, who was born in 1927 and has been dormant since the 1950's, belonged to NBC Universal. He lacks the currency of Bugs or Roger, and certainly would not know Shrek.

But Oswald directly preceded Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney's animation canon. Except for his elongated ears, and the absence of white gloves, Oswald is a ringer for Mickey Mouse, even if he is a different species.

Disney made 26 Oswald cartoons in 1927 and 1928 under contract to Universal Studios, but learned belatedly, and to his dismay, that Universal, not he, owned the rights to Oswald. That inspired Disney to create Mickey soon after and to never risk losing ownership of his creations again.

Coincidentally, it was Michaels's friend Robert A. Iger, the president of the Walt Disney Company, the parent of Mickey and ESPN, who vowed to Walt Disney's daughter Diane last year that he would bring Oswald back.

"I appreciate that he is a man of his word," Diane Disney Miller said in a statement. "Having Oswald around again is going to be a lot of fun."

Viewed through an anthropomorphic prism, Oswald might feel as if he had returned to his biological family.

And Michaels, in moving to NBC, said his primary concern when he asked ESPN to release him from his contract was to reunite with his broadcast family: Madden and two other crucial members of ABC's "Monday Night" team who moved to NBC, the producer Fred Gaudelli and the director Drew Esocoff.

Michaels said that, looking back, he felt pressure from Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Universal Sports, to decide by the end of July between NBC's and ESPN's offers. Ebersol admitted on the conference call that he should have extended the deadline through September to allow Michaels several games to get a sense of how much he would miss working with Madden.

"Monday Night" then proceeded on its lame-duck season, and six weeks into it, Ebersol hired Esocoff. In December, after attending a "Monday Night" game in Baltimore, Ebersol offered Gaudelli the producer's job.

"I saw Al and told him I was hiring Fred," Ebersol said on the conference call. "That's when it really hit him."

Meanwhile, Ebersol had a pre-Michaels-for-Oswald option at play: mold the analyst Cris Collinsworth into a play-by-play announcer. The plan culminated on the night of Jan. 14, when Collinsworth and Madden convened for a rehearsal at Madden's production facility in Pleasanton, Calif.

Outside sat a production truck with Gaudelli, Esocoff and Ebersol inside. The rehearsal combined the Collinsworth-Madden call, a video feed from that night's New England-Denver playoff game on CBS, one camera fixed on the announcers and another mounted in one end zone.

The rehearsal will never be seen publicly, and now that Michaels has joined NBC for an estimated $2.9 million annual salary, Collinsworth will return to the role for which he was originally hired: analyst for the Sunday night pregame program, working with Bob Costas and Sterling Sharpe.

The results of the Michaels trade will soon be visible at ESPN. The network received no money for setting Michaels free. But it will be able to show more highlights from the Olympics and other NBC events, and has acquired the Friday cable rights to the next four Ryder Cups for $12 million.

Yesterday, Michaels did not disavow remarks he made when he signed with ESPN that he was a "creature of 'Monday Night,' " or that the name of the series made his spine tingle. He said he would have given himself fully to ESPN had it not released him.

But then along came Oswald, Disney's lost child, whose role in the talks was unknown to Michaels until the end. Before that, he said, he joked that he could have been swapped for a "box of Krispy Kremes."